On Linda Boström Knausgård’s novella Welcome to America and the end of childhood.

Still from Village of the Damned (1960)

Every night when I was a child, my mother asked me to set the table before dinner. I came to believe that if there was anything odd among the four place settings—a chipped plate, say, or a knife from a different pattern—the one I gave it to would die. My habit in the beginning was to give it to my brother; later, my mother, and later still my father. I can’t explain these decisions. Night after night, no one would die, but my belief in this power, my fear of this power, persisted. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I’d mostly outgrown the belief. I had talked myself out of other secret, compulsive behaviors, like counting things pointlessly, never stepping on a certain corner tile in the foyer. Still, when setting the table, I began to take the doomed object, the portent, for myself—superstitiously, just in case.

Ellen, the eleven-year-old narrator of Linda Boström Knausgård’s recently released novella Welcome to America, believes she has similar powers, but life has provided her with more evidence that they’re real: “My dad’s dead. Did I mention that? It’s my fault. I prayed out loud to God for him to die and he did.” In the aftermath, Ellen has stopped talking or even writing—communication is dangerous, any crossing of the barrier between inner life and outer world. “You should never ask for what you want,” Ellen says, or maybe thinks—the transmission of this confession somehow bypasses her silence.

It disturbs the order of things. The way you really want them. You want to be disappointed. You want to be hurt and have to struggle to get over it. You want the wrong presents on your birthday.

Ellen does not feel remorse about her father, whose moods were erratic and threatened violence; he made her mother and everyone unhappy: “I never felt guilty about wishing he was dead.” She reasons it was murder in self-defense and, further, she is not fully responsible, since she achieved the killing through prayer. God is her coconspirator: “It was me and God who’d killed my dad. We’d done it together, once and for all.” But she is afraid of her own power, “the power there was in me speaking.” She quickly realizes silence is another kind of power—the power of withholding what other people want (“It was so easy. Just stopping. From one moment to the next my life was changed”). It’s a power she must have the strength of will to maintain: “Sometimes I’m scared I’ll talk in my sleep. That someone will hear me and hold it against me at some future time.” Ellen has spent so much of her childhood in fear. In her silence, finally, she becomes frightening; a threat and not the threatened.

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Had I not been a writer, I would have liked to be a singer, a parrot, a spy, or a neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, the only singing I do is in the shower, I only ever fly in economy class, and the closest I’ve come to espionage or brain surgery was when I dressed up as a doctor back in my college days, to sneak into the National Medical Center. Donning a white coat I had bought on the black market, each Tuesday I greeted the hospital guards with Hippocratic aplomb, and made for the language therapy room, where treatment was offered to aphasia patients, whose brain injuries impaired their ability to speak. In those days I was more interested in neurons than people, but in that somber room, shielded by a white coat, I began to find my way back to literature.

Not long ago, I discovered a striking coincidence: thirty years earlier, my father also dressed up as a doctor to sneak into the same hospital, with a different purpose—to visit his older brother who had lung cancer, and slip him prohibited foodstuffs outside of visiting hours. My uncle’s terminal illness became the nucleus of family stories of loss and misfortune, and meant I grew up in the shadow of a corpulent man felled in his prime by a rare carcinoma at the age of forty. In time, I realized this preoccupation with cancer wasn’t limited to my family, but that it distills most of our society’s fears and obsessions. Guilt, luck, karma, heredity, suffering, and mortality are just some of the coordinates that guide or mislead us when we face the emperor of all maladies, as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls it.

My father loathes the word cancer, to which he attributes ominous powers. A taboo. On the other hand, many people overuse it, to refer not to the out-of-control proliferation of cells, but to politicians, corruption, and bad habits. Reggaetón is the cancer of our society, they say. A man recently wrote on Facebook that feminism is the cancer of our age. (If I didn’t object to the metaphor in general, I’d say guys like him are the cancer of our age.) Maybe we should all dress up as doctors to tame this word, so feared yet overused; to tame the word cancer in a cultural sense, and at the same time, through science, free ourselves from its fury.

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Rather than singing ballads, salsas, or Italian arias as I would have liked, I spent my childhood shouting the word “kihap!”—“shout” in Korean, according to my tae kwon do teachers. “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted over and over, kicking the air in my belted white uniform. (By virtue of sheer perseverance, the belt turned red then black). “Shout! Shout! Shout!” I shouted, for fifteen years, all because my parents thought it a good idea to counteract my innate idleness with this ancient far-eastern practice. “SHOUT!” I later learned that the word’s Korean roots refer to vital energy (ki) and to the exercise of channeling it into an action (hap), but alas, I didn’t know that when I spent six to twelve hours a week thinking I was shouting, “Shout!”

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Illustration from Little Women, 1869. Courtesy of Houghton Library at Harvard University. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the first chapter of Little Women, when Louisa May Alcott is doling out archetypes to the siblings, Beth asks, “If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?”

“You’re a dear,” Meg answers, “and nothing else.”

People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.

Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart.

But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky. A twenty-two-year-old whose disease had wasted her body so that she looked like a middle-aged woman, she lashed out at her family and her fate with an anger that she had never before expressed.” Louisa and the others caring for Lizzie plied her with morphine, ether, and opium, though eventually the drugs lost any effect they once had on her. “[The] pain,” writes Cheever in American Bloomsbury, “seemed to drive her mad … even on large doses of opium, Lizzie attacked her sisters and asked to be left in peace.” Read More

Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni, 1841, oil on canvas, 46″ x 36″. Public domain.

The Manzoni Family is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel The Betrothed, published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the con­solidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children.

Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni’s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes magnil­oquent, Ginzburg’s is as spare, droll, and laconic as Italian writ­ing ever gets. While he narrated grandiose drama in one eight-hundred-page tome, she chronicled the intimacy of the humdrum in eight rather slender novels and novellas. He was a lifelong phobic who suffered frequent panic attacks and found it impos­sible to leave the house without company and protection. She showed great courage and initiative during the war, saving her children and herself from the Nazi round-ups of the Jews in Rome after her husband’s death. But perhaps most of all, Manzoni was a profoundly religious man whose faith is very much at the center of his writing. Ginzburg was not religious at all and had nothing to say on the matter. Read More

According to my Goodreads page, the first time I read The World According to Garp, by John Irving, was after my first year of college. I had thought, mistakenly, that I’d first read it in high school, but regardless, it had made an impression on me. It was my first exposure to an openly trans character and an openly asexual and aromantic character in fiction, the first book I read that explicitly discussed feminism and confronted toxic masculinity head on (though it didn’t call it that and, in my first reading, I didn’t, either). In rereading the novel recently, I wasn’t surprised that these themes had struck me so deeply, though Garp is about so much else as well.

In his new foreword to the fortieth-anniversary edition of the book, Irving writes that back in 1977, he thought the novel was about “the polarization of the sexes … the story was about men and women growing further apart. Look at the plot: a remarkable, albeit outspoken woman (Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields) is killed by a lunatic male who hates women; Garp himself is assassinated by a lunatic female who hates men.” But when Irving asked his then-twelve-year-old son, Colin, to read Garp in manuscript form, the boy saw the book completely differently. He told his father that it’s “about the fear of death … Maybe, more accurately, the fear of the death of children—or of anyone you love.” With that reading, it makes sense that my memory tricked me into thinking I first read Garp in high school: my father and his mother both died when I was sixteen, several months apart.

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An untrained listener’s guide.

During my hour-long commute home from work, when I’m too tired to even listen to podcasts, I listen to music. More often than might be healthy, I listen to Lana Del Rey, as she cycles through her doomy refrains about how her life is over, she’s filled with poison, she’s running like mad to heaven’s door. With their frothy melodrama, Lana’s songs tend to match my postwork mood so precisely that it doesn’t feel like listening at all. I don’t have to concentrate or pull myself in. I am already there. Listening, for most of us, doesn’t feel like doing anything. It’s more of a sensation than activity, a dreamy, ill-defined feeling stretching through us. We’re often not aware we are doing it, or even fully conscious. We literally—when we forget to shut off the television or our Spotify playlists—do it in our sleep.

But sometimes I wonder what would happen if we listened harder, or better, or more rigorously. This might seem exhausting. Am I incapable of relaxing? Probably. But music scholars insist that if we listened to music the way a musician would, understanding how notes trigger feelings, how tones take on their own textures and meanings, then we might experience something more visceral and expansive. We could push deeper into every song.

I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to gather some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally. Below is a quick, beginner’s guide to what I learned.

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